Tomorrow is media visionary’s Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday. To celebrate, catch the last days of SPACES&PLACES:VisioningMcLuhan@100 in our Main Space. It’s on until July 23. And it’s Thursday, so of course we’ll be partying out on our patio from 5-9pm. Stay tuned for all of the details here on the blog or on Facebook.
While you’re out and about, commemorate the man of many aphorisms tonight at the AGA at 7:30 with a celebratory evening of performances, special displays and cupcakes. Sounds pretty great! Plus, Professor Mark Adria will lead a tour of the AGA’s Warhol exhibition in relation to McLuhan’s ideas at 7pm. Before you go, refresh yourself about the interplay of McLuhan and Warhol’s ideas here, with a post from Anne Pasek.
McLuhan, we’re so happy that you were born in Edmonton. Happy birthday!
Check it out—our writer-in-residence alumnus Carolyn Jervis wrote a review of our current Main Space show, SPACES&PLACES in Vue Magazine. She writes:
Although Marshall McLuhan is a household name for the CBC-listening set, his ideas about how technology and media shapes our lives have faded from niche ubiquity, beyond his famous lines, “The medium is the message,” and, “Global village.” In honour of the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth, Latitude 53 and curator Aidan Rowe have on offer an exhibition of artwork inspired by the visionary thinker.
Read the whole thing online here or grab a copy of this week’s Vue street-side.
Sometimes events seem to line up with a perfect synchronicity.
For example, it is very appropriate that on the eve of the Marshall McLuhan centenary the Art Gallery of Alberta is host to the exhibition Andy Warhol: Manufactured. Warhol, the infamous pop artist, was not only a contemporary of McLuhan, he was in many ways a similarly pivotal media critic of the 1960s and beyond. McLuhan was to Warhol an “honorary muse” and the Andy’s often repeated phrase, that “in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” is actually borrowed from our dear Marshall.
Both Warhol and McLuhan were avid in their study of advertising, incorporating snappy slogans and iconic images into their public portfolios and personas. This layer of flattened, easy to consume wit often belies a far more complex and analytic substructure at the heart of both figures’ work. Beneath the gloss, I am convinced that Warhol and McLuhan engaged in a complementary examination of the effects of media on identity.
McLuhan, as I’ve mentioned in previousposts, suggested that the ‘cool effect’ of TV involved its viewers in an unprecedented kind of collectivity. The medium’s “simultaneous sharing of experiences as in a village or tribe,” McLuhan claimed, “creates a village or tribal outlook and puts a premium on togetherness… and mediocrity as a means of achieving togetherness.”
Compare McLuhan’s statement with Warhol’s:
“You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Could it be that in Andy Warhol we find the early iteration of McLuhan’s television tribalism?
What is it about TV that seems to flattens our identities, and perhaps engenders the embrace of mediocrity? What sort of critical lens might Warhol have to bring, not just communities of consumption, but to the media that structure them?
Herein lies ground that Andy Warhol is not often credited with breaking. In his life outside of pop art paintings, Warhol was also an experimental video and film maker. One piece in particular, Outer and Inner Space, is a surprisingly complex and nuanced examination of the differences between media and their identity effects. It should come as no surprise, then, that McLuhan’s theories are perfectly adaptable to thinking through this film.
Firstly, the mechanics of this piece require a bit of explanation. Two films are being projected simultaneous onto two screens (although the film reels have been digitized in this work’s incarnation in Andy Warhol: Manufactured). Each screen features two images of Edie Sedgwick: the actress who was Warhol’s temporary obsession in the 1960s. One set of Edies consists of pre-recorded video, played back on a grainy TV on the left of the two screens. The other Edies on the right were recorded on film in front of the television. The film Sedgwick, beautifully rendered in a smooth silver greyscale, seems quite at odds with her TV counterpart with her posterized, generic face.
The film Sedgwick and the TV Sedgwick seem to alternate between pointedly ignoring each other and engaging in a kind of dislocated conversation. The audio in the piece is incomprehensible; we hear only loud prelinguistic noise from Sedgwick’s lips. Here McLuhan’s point that the medium is the message may be true in a very literal way.
Our engagement with both portraits is quite distinct. The televised Sedgwick is reduced to flat anonymity- an easy bearer of the look the audience casts on her. The filmic Sedgwick, conversely, frequently exchanges gazes with the audience, who is made more acutely aware of her discomfort in proximity to her double, and her increasingly desperate search for cues from the off-screen Warhol. In McLuhan’s parlance, one Sedgwick is hot and one Sedgwick is cold. One is an individual, and one is a repository for a tribal identity. One is inner and one is outer. One is wine and one is coke. By butting the two together in the same, doubled frames, Warhol sets up the conditions in which to examine our different engagements with radically diametric media.
However, I’ve only scratched the surface on this piece. I’m hoping that we can have something of a collaborative (but not necessarily tribal) discussion in the comments section of this blog. Have you seen this piece? What were your thoughts? What kind of work do you think is being done here with identity, and how might that play into McLuhan’s theories of hot and cold media or Warhol’s fascination with celebrity consumption and collectivity? Alternatively, maybe neither approach appeals to you and you think about this piece in an entirely different frame. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If, at the end of the day, there are still many lingering questions (and I do hope this is the case), University of Alberta professor Marco Adria will be giving a free lecture at the AGA on July 20th concerning the relation between McLuhan and Warhol. We can lay all the hard questions on him.
A video clip of Outer and Inner Space is available here.
Andy Warhol: Manufactured is at the Art Gallery of Alberta until August 21st.
Tonight’s opening of Spaces&Places:VisioningMcLuhan@100 includes an exciting interactive element: when you visit the gallery you’ll be able to give your own titles to the work on display. The submitted titles will be visible on entitle.ca and in a live projection in the gallery.
Our friend Fish Griwkowsky wrote about our new show Spaces&Places:VisioningMcLuhan@100 in the Edmonton Journal this week:
“All of Canada, the world, the World Wide Web wants to lay claim to McLuhan,” Todd Janes says at the downtown gallery where he’s executive director. “A link to his birth here and formative years is great, but Edmonton can be proud of Marshall McLuhan the same way we’re proud of Wayne Gretzky. I think he would appreciate it, even find it funny.”
Fish also talks a little bit about some of the works you can see on the walls starting today. The opening is tonight at 7pm, but you can come early and have a drink on our Patio starting at 5.
We’re still reminiscing about last week’s patio kickoff. Despite the storm clouds, it was an awesome turn-out and we all had a lot of fun—Latitude 53, guest hosts Team Edmonton & Womonspace, and bunch of awesome members and guests. Thanks to everyone who came out and helped make it such a success.
For SPACES&PLACES, we’re teaming up with the Media Ecology Association and the University of Alberta to pay tribute to media guru Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday. It’s also our contribution to this summer’s THE WORKS festival.
Meanwhile, in the ProjEx Room, Berlin-based Barbara Prokop takes a look at a great architectural debate between client and architect in VITUALAZIO. Tour a conceptual 1970s villa and imagine what it might be like to live there with the aid of Prokop’s absorbing two-channel video installation.
Sound artist Raylene Campbell will also be at the patio, showing off her new media installation in our Summer Incubator Series.Visit the community gallery at 7pm to hear her talk a bit about her work.
Featuring
To add to the excitement, musicians Gary James Joynes, Scott Smallwood and Shawn Pinchbeck will be on the rooftop to perform a live electro-acoustic set. Later, DJ Josh Trayner delivers a special mix dedicated to the man of the evening, Marshall McLuhan.
The patio this week features food from Cafe Select, a yummy door prize from Kerstin’s Chocolates and great cocktails from el Jimador and Finlandia Vodka.
Other than our opening and Rooftop Patio Thursday (lots more on that coming tomorrow morning—it’s going to be a good one), there’s lots of Marshall McLuhan events coming up around town. In particular, we at Latitude 53 are interested in this one:
Friday, 24 June 2011 – “McLuhan and artistic vision in the wireless city,” a panel discussion with authors Elena Lamberti (Università di Bologna), Rob Shields (University of Alberta), and Douglas Barbour (University of Alberta), 10:30 a.m., Telus Centre Auditorium, University of Alberta.
We’ve just updated our website with the two shows opening later this week. We’re busy installing in the gallery this week, but expect some more details soon.
Last week I published the first part of my primer on McLuhan, and some really interesting debate came out of it. I hope you’ll join me at the end of this article to hash out any lingering thoughts about the man. And trust me, this is a man who lingers.
Continuing on with the work of Marshall McLuhan, let’s jump into his most famous of slogans:
The Medium Is The Message
McLuhan took the somewhat controversial opinion that the content of media was quite irrelevant. He thought the concern for violence in television programming was misguided and stubbornly refused to analyze the policy points of political TV debates. Content, he famously said, “is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The real important effect, the stuff worth studying, was the cognitive structuring of hot and cold media.
Content, to McLuhan, was merely the form of a previous medium. The content of print is speech; the content of film is theatre. Others, like television, weave together multiple kinds of previous media content. Alternatively, some media, like a light bulb, are content-free and are therefore pure message (the message again being the phenomenological effect- how having instant access to light at all hours of the day may have primed us to think and act).
When this kind of thinking is applied to art it gets pretty easy to compare McLuhan’s media supremacy to Clement Greenberg’s vision of Modernism. If the medium is the message, then the message of painting is painting itself. Cubism was one of McLuhan’s favourite examples of a medium, freed from its obligation to content by the invention of other media (like film and photography), finally able to announce itself as the true message. A cubist work announces itself as painting, revealing the mechanics of the medium.
McLuhan Today
This structuring of art and media has increasingly proven to be undesirable to artists and theorists as time goes on. While the cognitive effects of media continue to be a fruitful vein of enquiry, it certainly isn’t the only way to study communications and technology. Art quite evidently has more to say than just to emphasize its construction as a medium. Its content, after all, may not be so easily dismissed as McLuhan would seem to suggest.
Likewise, certain passages of his works haven’t aged well. Occasional asides about the passing phenomenon of speed reading seem somewhat misguided or, when women or minorities are discussed (which is seldom) there is a cringe-inducing hint of essentialism. Also troubling is the lack of consideration given to how media are imbricated in larger relations of power. Media monopolies, spectacle punditry, and the low-level of public discourse beg questions that we aren’t likely to answer through McLuhan. Finally, the reoccurring humanist tinge to his characterization of technology has also been challenged, as media theorists such as Jussi Parikka increasingly adopt a posthumanist lens to media scholarship. This is to say, media may not necessarily be the extensions of man, but rather suggest a different, more insectile intelligence.
Media have also grown up since the 1960s. HD TV rejects the suggestion of television as a cold medium, but perhaps the internet has taken its place. The low definition video streams, fragmented webspeak, and 2.0 collectivities of the contemporary digital world may be the most fruitful place to apply McLuhan’s theories.
Art and McLuhan
Any review of McLuhan would be incomplete if it were to limit itself to just the man. His ideas were immensely influential on the youth of the 1960s, sometimes to the puzzlement of their elders.
Alan Dunn, 1966, The New Yorker.
The impact his thinking had in the video art of the 1960s is quite significant. Nam June Paik, for instance, can be seen to reflect several McLuhanist themes in his work. Electronic Opera #1 cheekily asks the viewers of “participation TV” to turn off their television sets. Electronic Superhighway suggests the regional tribalism that McLuhan foresaw, depicting all the states of the USA through neon tubes and video loops (Idaho unfortunately is reduced to a clip of potatoes arranged in a grocery store). This idea is writ on a global scale in Megaton/Matrix, which rather slyly suggests that the body has been excluded from all these discussions of media. So, through Paik there’s a translation of McLuhan’s ideas, but also something of a critique.
Nam June Paik, TV Magnet, 1965.
McLuhan and Art
Paik’s critical appraisal of media actually fits into McLuhan’s larger assessment of the role of art in society. Seen as a kind of radar or ‘early warning system’, McLuhan believed that art empowers us “to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.”
I quite like this metaphor of radar; it invites the image of art being fired as probes in every direction, occasionally being pinged back when it hits something. Art in this schema is both predictive and inquisitive and demands our attention with the same gravity as science journals or political punditry. Rather than divorcing art from the world, as High Modernism seems to do, radar art remains deeply attuned to the wide-reaching shifts of the present in order to meet the future with some cognisance. “Art as a radar environment,” McLuhan states, “takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite.” Well said, Marshall.
So, as we gear up for Marshall McLuhan Day on July 21st and the series of very promising gallery shows and lectures, take some time to give this Canadian intellectual giant one more spin. The first chapter of Understanding Media and his 1969 interview for playboy (!) are both excellent reads. If McLuhan himself is like a radar machine we can expect some hits and some misses, but also, hopefully, we’ll discover an image of the path ahead.
Marshall McLuhan was, to say the least, kind of a big deal. Best known for his snappy slogans and critical study of the medium of television, McLuhan was the popular intellectual of the 1960s and 70s. He was a literary scholar, a futurist, pretty damn funny and one of the rare academics who embraced public life and intellectual spectacle in equal measure. He’s the one who told us “the medium is the message,” that we live in a “global village,” and that the “Electric Age of Information” was going to require an all together different approach from the norms of the mechanical-literary West.
What’s more, he’s one of ours. Born in Edmonton in 1911, Marshall McLuhan will soon be celebrated on the centenary of his birth. Latitude 53, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the University of Alberta and others are assembling an array of events, lectures, and art work in June and July around this man and his ideas. You can expect to see and hear a lot about McLuhan in the coming months and yet, for many, this will be an introduction rather than a revisiting.
Alan Dunn, 1966, The New Yorker.
Nam June Paik, TV Magnet, 1965.
